In the vast world of video games, there are bound to be tons of hits and misses. You ha🌄ve iconic titles that were always destined for greatness, forgettable ones on both ends of the spectrum, and absolute bombs that will be remembered for the wrong reasons.
In that messy and glorious pot of genres, w🌄e also have amazing games that, on paper, shouldn’t have worked quite as well as they did. These games defied the trends of their time, finicky algorithms, and all the fickleness 🤡that developers must face to go down in the gaming industry as definitive successes.
10 ꧅🅰 Viscera Cleanup Detail
Players often go to games as a means of escape. With that in m⛎ind, doing chores and cleanup isn’t exactly the most enticing of descriptions. However, Viscera Cleanup Detail manages to create an engaging and oddly relaxing experience while telling fascinating stories just by the aftermath you have to face (and clean).
Any story here is told by the environment and the fact that you have to turn gory, corpse-filled, and bullet-ridden locations into pristine spaces that no one would suspect were the sites of gruesome battles, attacks from escaped aliens, and rampages from homicidal freaks. Why risk your lif💎e as the hero when you can be a glorious sci-fi janitor?
9 ꦜ Goat Simulator
The title speaks for itself. In this iconic game, you are a goat. As Pilgor, you are free to roam around the world, lick everything in sight, and cause as much mayhem as you please. A game that started as a joke ended up being so successful that it spawned ports to n🍷ew devices years after its release.
At the time of writing, Goat Simulator has a sequel coming up called, of course, Goat Simulator 3. You’d think a buggy meme game about being a goat would simply fade away, but it remains an ever-enduring physics 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:sandbox game that delightfully caters to༒ the chaos-loꦫving goat in you.
8 Super Mario Bro👍s. 3 𓄧
Why wouldn’t a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario game work? Well, at the time of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Bros. 3’s release, a lot of 𓄧platformers flo𓆏pped, there was a ROM shortage that delayed its North American release, and it introduced so many new gameplay elements to the series that risked it being deemed “too different” from its predecessors.
However, the radical additions to Mario’s abilities, a new map you could explore and use to return to previous levels, ❀and extra secrets you could find made Super Mario Bros. 3 an extremely enjoyable game that is still arguably one of the best ones in the Mario lineup. It became one of the best-selling games during its release and still holds up today.
7 ℱ Scribblenauts
Scribblenauts has a concept that could have flopped hard if it weren’t executed as well as developer 5th Cell did. There are two ways this could have gone wrong - either it doesn’t deliver on the huge promise that you can create and🗹 edit virtually everything, or it just ends up being boring as you mostly just type stuff and see how these creations interact with the world.
Lucky for players and the game’s creators, Scribblenauts ended up being creative, different, and end🙈lessly amusing. The series soared to even greater heights with the release🌄 of Scribblenauts Unlimited for PC and the Wii U.
6 ꦐ My Friend Pedro
A man and a sentient banana go on a killing spree – it’s a tough pitch, and yet 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:My Friend Pedro excels in absurd and truly fun fashion. In the game, you traverse various side-scrolling levels, with an emphasis on doing cool rolls and flips along the way. Despite the saturation of shooters out there🅘, this title manages to stand out and be worth playing for hours on end.
To be fair, the people you’re fighting are 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the bad guys. That’s what the banana said, so it must be true. Who knew running around🎶 with an arsenal of guns and a ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚfloating fruit could be so effective?
5 𓆉 GTA Online
One of the reasons 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto 5 works so well is because you, the player, have the ultimate a𝄹bility to dictate how the game goes. Even though there are missions, narratives, and a world that moves on its own, the player ultimately decides whether or not they’re going to wreak havoc all over the city.
Now, put that power in the hands of a myriad of players and throw them into the same city. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:GTA Online should not have survived 🍰the onslaught of griefers and hackers, and yet it simply remains one of the most enjoyable multiplayer experiences out there. There’s always something to do in the fictional world of San Andreas, whether you just want to drive around or actually do the missions.
While other multiplayer open-world gamesꦫ like Red Dead Redemption Online and, technically, Club Peꦆnguin died, GTA Online thrives. There are even specific roleplaying servers that let you literally just take on regular jobs as you would in the real world.
4 Getting Over It With Bennet♐ F🅠oddy
Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy is all about frustration, and all you do is move your cꦡharacter Diogenes’ hammer using your mouse. There is literally no other action you can take other than to move that hammer. Plus, failure means losing all your progress because there are no checkpoints.
You’d think there would be a line between challenging gameplay that is still fun and pure punishment just because. Somehow, this game manages to dance on that line with expert grace. Should you succeed, all that happens is your character basically ascends into space. For all intents and purposes, there is no reason this game should be as good as it is and yet few pleasures can match actually Getting Ovꦅer It.
3 Stray
Stray puts you in a lonely cyberpunk world populated by robots as you take on the role of a stray cat. It’s not surprising that it worked, considering the promising concept, but it&ꦉrsquo;s amazing to see just how well it has done.
As is the nature of most games published by Annapurna Interactive, Stray🀅 is mostly about taking in the world around you and connecting with your protagonist. Although you can explore and meet many characters, your protagonist doesn’t speak, and much of the gameplay is very minimal. Despite that, the characterization works so that you end up feeling attached to the cat and everyone they form connections with.
Stray ma💮nages to escape monotony despite its largely relaxed gameplay style and forgiving platforming elements. Plus, it manages to pluck at your heartstrings with a short t𝕴ale and a few meows.
2 🅷 Doki Doki Literat🙈ure Club
In terms of horror, you wouldn’t really think that a visual novel would be one of the standouts in the genre. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doki Doki Literature Club starts out like any normal high school dating visual novel, and then quickly takes a dark turn. Even whe🌞n that twist happens, it still manages to subvert expectations with even more unexpected events and gam🍸eplay changes.
It’s a quick game that touches upon dark topics and effectively gets under your skin with its approach to scares, despite initially looking like those free-to-play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:dating sims that your friends tried to hide from their Steam history. It's a deceptively simple game that claws out of itself to become an even better one.
1 Undertale
An RPG that discourages you from “leveling up?" Remembers your actions even on a new save? Uses very retro 🌄graphics? Has a skeleton that ꧒warns you about having “a very bad time?"
These are all questions that Toby Fox basically answered with a resounding “yes” when he released 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Undertale. Keep in mind, this is the same year play꧋ers got Bloodborne,ꦫ The Witcher 3, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. With all of these factors, you would think that the odds would be against Undertale’s lasting power.
However, Undertale remains one of the ཧmost amazing games in recent memory. The characters, writing, music, branched choices, and freedom to fight or befriend those you come across easily make this game a remarkable experience that sticks with you long after you’ve finished your first, second, or tenth ruꦕn.